Part-Time Sovereign AI CTO — On-Prem & Regulatory

Mickai Ltd builds AI for organisations that are not allowed to use the cloud. If your compliance, security or regulatory rules stop you putting real data into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, we are the alternative. This includes hospitals, prisons, banks, government departments, defence contractors, law firms, operators of critical national infrastructure, and any business whose data is simply too sensitive to leave its own walls.

Our system is Mickai SIOS, a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System. It runs on your own hardware, inside your own building. Your data never leaves the premises and is never sent to anyone else's cloud. Every action the AI takes is written to a tamper-proof, cryptographically signed log, so compliance teams, auditors and regulators can prove exactly what happened and when. The cryptography underneath is built to survive future quantum computers, which is the direction the NHS, the Ministry of Justice and the financial regulators are now moving in. The architecture is protected by 104 filed UK patent applications and 2,340 claims, owned by Mickai Ltd.

Why now? The EU AI Act reaches full application for high-risk systems on 2 August 2026, and the UK has stood up its own sovereign-AI programme. Regulated buyers are being told to prove what their AI did, keep the data on-premise, and stand behind it in an audit. Public cloud AI cannot meet that bar. We can. This is the moment the category we have built for arrives, and we want a technical founder in the seat before it does.

The role involves hiring a part-time CTO to do three things, in this order:

• Get inside the tech. Read the patents, the ebooks and the code. Understand the privacy router, the post-quantum audit ledger and the Twenty-Five Brain Architecture well enough to defend any technical claim we make, to anyone, in any room.
• Make it better. Hands-on. Tighten the substrate, harden the cryptography, improve the runtime and get the rough edges out of the product. This is a perfectionist's seat. We want someone who can't walk past a sloppy implementation and leave it alone.
• Sell it. Be the technical face in front of clients (HMPPS, NHS, FCA-regulated firms, CNI buyers, sovereign-AI investors). Run live demos, field the hard architecture questions on the spot, write the briefing notes that get us through procurement, and back the commercial team on every regulated-buyer pitch.

You will work directly with the founder and the COO. AI tooling is central to how we work. This is a leverage-first role: no team to hide behind, and outsized ownership from day one.

What we're looking for:

• You have been a senior software engineer or tech lead for years, and you still write code yourself.
• You can work across our actual stack: TypeScript (Next.js, React) for the web, Rust for the desktop system (Tauri shell, Rust core), and Python.
• You have shipped real machine-learning work, including fine-tuning open foundation models, not just calling a hosted LLM API.
• You have built agentic AI features: agents that use tools, call functions, chain steps and do real work for a real user.
• You are strong on system integration. We tie together a local inference server, a desktop shell, a Python layer, and a website with auth and Postgres. The CTO makes all of it one clean system.
• You have done some applied cryptography, or you can learn it fast.
• You are convincing in client and investor meetings. When someone asks a hard technical question, you answer it well enough that the room agrees with you. This one is non-negotiable.
• You understand, or will quickly learn, the rules regulated buyers in the UK and EU follow when they buy AI: the EU AI Act, NHS DSPT, DORA and FCA expectations.
• You are comfortable with hands-on, early-stage work. For the first few months there is no team to delegate to, so you will be doing it yourself.
• You use AI tools heavily in your own day-to-day to move faster.

Compensation: Equity-only for now. We're a pre-funding parent IP entity, licensing into an operating company that's actively raising. Salary comes online once investment closes or licensing revenue lands. Equity will reflect the seniority of the seat. If equity-only doesn't work for you at this stage, please don't apply. We'd rather wait than misrepresent the position.

How to apply: Hit Apply and answer the screening questions. We ask for proof of every "Yes". Anyone shortlisted might be asked to send the following to hello@mickai.co.uk: A CV or LinkedIn profile, links to code you've written (GitHub, or anything you can share), and a short note on the most relevant thing you've shipped, ideally something involving ML fine-tuning, agentic features, or a Rust/desktop product.